- Self Portrait, a 1970 album by Bob Dylan. Listen for Dylan’s Nashville crooner alter ego coming through on this one. Mostly covers of old folk songs, this is one of Dylan’s more stylistically interesting albums.
Wikipedia tells me that Dylan considered the album a joke. I don’t care if he likes it or not, it’s mostly quite good. Favorite tracks include “It Hurts Me Too” (a blues standard minimally rendered), “Alberta #1” (a folky, almost Laurel Canyon-sounding groove), and “Wigwam” (a buoyant, lilting little track with a New Orleans jazz band sound so tinny and airy it betrays a deeper, Afro-Caribbean influence).
The album cover itself is a masterpiece, and while this isn’t going to be anyone’s favorite Dylan album, it’s worth mining. - “Out of Mind” by Mikayla McVey. McVey’s bio says she was born in Virginia and currently lives in Oakland, which seems like the perfect origin story for my next favorite artist. Hat tip to Toby for putting this wonderful track on my radar.
The song is done in the old Nashville Sound of the 50s and 60s, a style which used smooth and softly weeping strings and steel guitars to round out the sound and, most crucially, used echo chambers and reverb to create a more polished version of the old honky-tonk twang. In contemporary terms, the song is the perfect mixture of Zooey Deschanel’s rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar Town”, plus a generous dose of “Middle Child” by Daniel Romano.
McVey nails it on this track—will be a top song of the year for me—but early forays into the rest of her discography have been less fruitful than expected so far. Will continue to follow her and hope that her next album is her best one yet.
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Footnotes from the Ragged Frontier 
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